Send Junk Email To Chipotle, Feed Children

Here’s an interesting promotion: for every 100,000 junk emails sent to nojunk@chipotlejunk.com, Chipotle will donate $10,000 to The Lunch Box, which will help feed school kids with healthy junk-free recipes for lunch, instead of the usual prison cheese and high fructose corn syrup.

Chipotle is good for up to $50,000, so I’m guessing it will take them about ohhhh 30 minutes to fill up their inbox to the max.

So wait — I’ve got to send junk mail to a food company to encourage them to send money to a second food company that will feed student. Seems wildly inefficient, but I’m guessing that Chipotle food wouldn’t pass nutritional guidelines for use in schools.

Ok, I’ll ask. Why don’t they just make a donation themselves? Especially since sending junk mail is not the same thing as buying any of their food. Maybe if the promotion was ‘buy a whatever and we’ll donate a nickel or whatever to a food charity’ then it would seem worthwhile. But me sending email to them just looks like a sneaky way for them to get an email address so they can turn around and send me junk mail.
But if people send their junk mail and they make the donation, then good for them and thank you.

Hmmm, I’m wondering if this is anything like that thing KFC had with the pink buckets where KFC already had paid a certain amount to the breast cancer foundation and they had to make it up by telling people their money will go towards it. But then again I doubt it because KFC was spending money and then by selling the buckets had a chance to recoup it where as with Chipotle is just going based on what junk emails they get. Either way as long as some form of money is going to the foundation then it’s a good thing.

I just think it’s a little odd that neither The Lunch Box nor Chipotle’s web sites have any mention of this “promotion” at all, as of this moment. You would think especially The Lunch Box would want to encourage visitors to their site to take advantage of the chance to make an effortless donation.

Predicting an update/retraction of the story by Consumerist in 3, 2, 1….

Thanks for the links. I was hoping to see something mentioned about it in something other than the usual news regurgitation sites, which tend to just copy/paste each other’s content on stuff like this, and you found it.

For those who didn’t bother to follow the links Billy found, an interview the Chipotle’s PR person says they chose to promote it on Facebook and Twitter rather than bother to mention it on their website. They claim the website is in the middle of undergoing an upgrade so they didn’t want to put it there. Right. I still don’t see any mention of it on The Lunch Box. That’s the one omission I’m really surprised at.

My initial take on this was that someone had set up an elaborate practical joke to get a lot of well-meaning people banned by their ISP’s for forwarding large amounts of spam around.